Abstract
Improvising on Rousseau’s well-known opening lines from his work The Social Contract, Lewis R. Gordon reformulates the French philosopher’s theme, allowing the muted voice of the slave to speak: “The slave is born in chains, but she has freedom within her bosom. How is this possible?”1 The slave’s chains, unlike those of which Rousseau speaks, left their violent imprints on Douglass and countless other black bodies. In the racialized society of nineteenth-century America, physical chains served as outward markers of a hegemonic, socially constructed narrative alleging an internal reality, namely, the inferior, subhuman status of blacks. Rejecting this interpretation and refusing the other-imposed silence, Frederick Douglass, in his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,2 speaks, describing lucidly how his subjectivity was (pre)scripted by the hegemonic narratives and sociopolitical practices of white society.
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Notes
Lewis R. Gordon, “Douglass as an Existentialist,” in Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, ed. Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 210.
See Andrew Cole, “What Hegel’s Master/Slave Dialectic Really Means,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34:3 (2004), 577–610, for an interpretation of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic—or better “lord” and “bonds-man” dialectic. Cole argues that Hegel ’s analyses of the se relat ions were influenced by his knowledge of Germany’s feudal structures and thus were not as “abstract and idealistic” as some commentators claim, but rather “fully embedded in materiality and history” (579).
For an interesting discussion on this topic, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., Chapter 4, “Frederick Douglass and the Language of the Self,” in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 98–125.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in Douglass: Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, My Bondage and My Freedom, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 15.
See also Eric J. Sundquist, “Frederick Douglass: Literacy and Paternalism,” in Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991), 120–32. Sundquist shows how the various revisions in Douglass’s autobiographies point not only to Douglass’s own existential struggles with his paternity, but they also constitute “a meditation on the corruption of the family by paternalistic power” (ibid., 127).
For a critical discussion of Douglass’s use of resurrection language, see J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 301–304.
Alexandre Kojève Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols and ed. Alan Bloom.Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 7.
G. W. F. Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 115, paragraph 189.
The Columbian Orator was a textbook found in nearly every nineteenth-century American classroom. See, e.g., Granville Ganter, “‘He Made Us Laugh Some,’” Frederick Douglass’s Humor,” African American Review 37 (2003), esp. 547–8.
See also David W. Blight, The Columbian Oratorn (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
Michel Foucault “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1982), 780.
Michel Foucault History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 95.
Cf., Yves Michaud, “Des modes de subjectivation aux techniques de soi: FoucaulT et les identités de notre temps,” Cités: Philosophie Politique Histoire 2 (2000), esp. 15–18.
Douglass Narrative of the Life, 97. For a more detailed discussion of how Douglass’s appendix—written by himself rather than a white man—is both a double act of resistance, see Cynthia R. Nielsen, “Resistance is Not Futile: Frederick Douglass on Panoptic Plantations and the Un-Making of Docile Bodies and Enslaved Souls,” Philosophy and Literature 35:2 (2011), esp. 257–67.
Richard Yarborough, “Race, Violence, Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Herioic Slave’,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and History Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 168.
Douglass “The Heroic Slave,” in Three Classic African American Novels, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Signet, 1990), 66.
See also Ivy G. Wilson, “On Native Ground: Transnationalism, Frederick Douglass, and ‘The Heroic Slave,’” PMLA 121 (2006), 453–68. In addition to highlighting Douglass’s strategic use of the Declaration of Independence and the principles of 1776 to win over his white audience, Wilson foregrounds the irony of the novella’s ending, namely, the slaves do not find a home in the United States but remain in Nassau.
For a critique of the gender-difference perspective, see Joan C. Tronto, “Beyond Gender Difference to a Theory of Care,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12 (1987), 644–63.
Kimberly Drake, “Rewriting the American Self: Race, Gender, and Identity in the Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs,” MELUS 22 (1997), 94.
Douglass’s at times strained relations with white female abolitionists, and his lack of direct advocacy for black female voting rights is too complex a topic to treat sufficiently here. For an excellent analysis of Douglass’s work as a women’s suffrage activist, see Gary L. Lemons’s book, Womanist Forefathers: Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois (Albany: State University of New York, 2009), esp. Chapter 2.
Douglass, “Woman Suffrage Movement” (1870), in Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: De Capo Press, 1992), 94.
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© 2013 Cynthia R. Nielsen
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Nielsen, C.R. (2013). Frederick Douglass on Power Relations and Resistance “From Below”. In: Foucault, Douglass, Fanon, and Scotus in Dialogue. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137034113_3
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